The Internet has emerged as a communicative form that people use to create, sustain, and become part of communities. Communication is essential to fostering concrete interactions between group members, which provide the basis for the existence of community, whether in a face-to-face situation or online. The strategies for the construction and assertion of identity within websites also play a key role in establishing commonalities and connections among group members needed for communities. Information on websites, such as discourse and images, represent and shape community and identity. Together, they create points of connectivity between participants and with other communities to which they are connected. Interaction between communities exhibiting similar characteristics creates a network of interconnections, forming a larger communal structure and a broader sense of community than previously existed. Community, identity, and connectivity dynamically work together, forming an interdependent relationship to create specific and broad communicative networks.

In this thesis research project I analyze community structures—both the content residing in these structures and the connections made among multiple structures—to explore the Internet as a space in which communities are constructed, participants interact, and knowledge is transmitted. I use a specific selection of Native American websites to illustrate more concretely the processes and structures through which online communities are constructed, as well as how these communities are related to each other structurally and rhetorically. The bulk of this study’s data is collected using unobtrusive observation, performed in full anonymity on the Internet, specifically by viewing and documenting various Native American community websites. I explore how Native American online communities are constructed within Internet sites in a literal sense—by categorizing and analyzing key structural components within the websites—as well as how these key components contribute to the assertion of group identity and broader communal structure. I analyze discourse, images, and links used on websites to form commonalities between members, establish community and represent identity. I employ fuzzy logic to represent and analyze qualitative data collected from websites, to measure levels of connectivity between online communities. These levels are represented in a two dimensional model, illustrating points of connectivity within my sample of websites, as well as providing a visual representation of the intangible communicative space that is the Internet.

In the following sections I review and build upon previous scholarly works involving concepts of community and representation of identity on the Internet to establish an interpretive framework that functions as the basis of this study. Following my discussion of theoretical concepts, I describe my methodology for selecting and analyzing websites. I briefly discuss Native American contemporary cultural issues to provide a context to understand themes within websites I encountered. After this overview, I perform content and structural analyses of Native American website cases to explore how concepts of community and representation of identity recursively work together in the creation of specific and broad communicative networks. My primary research questions include: How do concepts of community and identity representation work together to shape groups through the Internet? Does the Internet offer a fundamentally new way of fostering connectivity between members, constructing community, and representing identity? A secondary set of questions addresses how connectivity might be assessed across websites. In this paper I experiment with applying fuzzy logic to qualitative data collected from websites to measure levels of connectivity between websites as well as visualize a broader relational network structure.